The city for conlangs

This is a guide that may help you creating in your language.

Contents 1 Cases 2 Genders 2.1 Two genders 2.2 Three genders 2.3 Four genders 3 Tones 4 Pronunciation

[edit] Cases

Wikipedia: Grammatical cases

[edit] Genders

Wikipedia: Grammatical gender

Genders are types of words. When learning a word, the speaker must remember what type. For example, 'a man' in French is un homme, but 'a woman' translates to une femme. This exists/existed in many European languages, including Old English. Below are some examples.

[edit] Two genders

• Masculine/feminine
• Common/neuter
• Animate/inanimate

[edit] Three genders

• Masculine/feminine/neuter
• Animate/inanimate/neuter

[edit] Four genders

• Masculine/feminine/neuter/real
• Masculine/feminine/animate/inanimate

[edit] Tones

Wikipedia: Tone (linguistics)

Tones can be a mean to differentiate words with same spelling or written form, which can get useful with languages with short and many words.

At current, linguists see the development of tones in two ways:

1. Tones can develop because of the reduction of assimilated sounds. For example, ancient Chinese of two thousand years ago was believed to have no tones but consonant clusters. When consonants clusters simplified, tones developed.
2. On the other hand, tones can simplified as well. Tones reduced when consonants further simplified and words further diversified from words to phrases.

[edit] Pronunciation

Wiktionary: Pronunciation

There are two types of pronunciation.

• A word reading 'bade' would be pronunced something like /bæːd/. Examples: English, French
• A word reading 'bade' would be pronunced something like /baː.de/. Examples: Swedish, Italian